Does Google index audio files? [Telecom]

Google has POG ("Plain Old Google"). Google Video, Google Images, Google Scholar, and numerous others. Is there a "Google Audio", or something similar, that will index downloadable MP3 and other audio files?

I've just started looking into this, and not many such files seem to appear in basic POG (note: I'm after things like seminar talks and lectures, much more than music files).

[And apologies if this is not the right NG for this query, but it seems telecom related, and I'm not sure where else to go.]
Reply to
AES
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Right now, no. I have heard from several sources including Leo LaPorte's "This Week in Google" podcast that the reason Google is offering 1-800-GOOG-411 is so they can fine tune their speech recognition using a large sample of voices from a diverse population. I would have to think that they have indexing of audio files in their sights, but I would also imagine this is a long ways off. I have Google Voice and the transcriptions of voice mails is good, but it's not great. It will have to be great before they can think of indexing podcasts, lectures, etc.

So see, I swung it back around to a telecom topic, so you're good. ;-)

John

Reply to
John Mayson

Not really. A more-or-less complete list of Google products is here:

POG searching for "{topic} MP3 download" might be useful.

Seminars and lectures now tend to be in video form, either streaming over the 'Net, DVDs, or various-typed files (*.flv, *.mp4, etc.) that can be copied to your system for later playback.

Given your Stanford posting address, a search using this:

Zimbardo seminar download

produces some interesting results, such as several lectures by Prof. Zimbardo that can be downloaded.

I just checked to see if any of the 1950s and 1960s Bell Science Hour programs with Dr. Frank Baxter were available for download, but didn't have any success. I quickly found "Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays" and "Thread of Life" in my laserdisc collection; would have to search longer to find more since I didn't file them under "Bell Science".

Reply to
Thad Floryan

I wasn't really thinking of indexing audio files by applying speech recognition to their content, although now that you've pointed out this possibility, I begin to grasp what this could do.

I was just thinking of indexing audio files by their titles and maybe other textual metadata in or associated with the file. That's obviously a limited capability, but even it could be useful for some purposes (and it's how some images are captured into Google Images, is that not so?)

Reply to
AES

Thanks much for this! -- more valuable to me than the answer to my original query.

I'm in fact involved with a number of organizations at Stanford University that generate and capture audio lectures, talks, and seminars that are of wide interest outside the university. Stanford's official process for making these available is distribute them (free) through "Stanford at iTunes U" .

Since I intensely dislike iTunes, even setting aside the whole idea of distributing academic content as "tunes", and since Stanford has a massive IT organization that could surely make all this material available directly from its inhouse servers, I'd like to see it do so.

You've steered me to go looking for situations where others within the university are doing this, or at least doing something other [than] giving the Apple Store control over the distribution.

Reply to
AES

You can search through binary files posted to Usenet newsgroups with sites like

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Reply to
Richard

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